Monday, April 23, 2012

I have discussed dates, and deadlines to submit my progress to my two emphasis advisers. I will be submitting to them via email twice a month, the middle and the end of each month, May through July, and then submit the completed work around August. 10, hoping to defend around August 15.

SUBJECT: Proposal for a critical, argumentative essay that compares the
early forms of printed news media and their relationship to advertising copy with
the current early days of social media and their relationship to advertising
copy written as a first-person perspective from within the mass media industry.

Thesis

The essay I propose will be a post-modern, rhetorical hybrid; one
part documented scholarship, and well-reasoned argument; one part gonzo-style,
narrative/phantasmagoria of floundering personal experience within the academic
environment during the time in which primacy shifted away from print media to
web-based social media. But it is the apparent philosophical shift in the
ethics that inform social discourse that I expect will be the real crux of the
project. The same question of priority that has always existed in media—whether
media as a vector for discourse drives the market, kicking and screaming,
toward solutions to social problems, or whether the market, taken as the
incarnation of ideology, drives media content to rationalize its social impact
retrospectively through public consensus building—will likely remain unanswered,
but shall stand as a unifying thread throughout the essay. Ultimately, my hope
is to organize the research information, and marshal the narrative language so
as to give the essay an underlying structural representation of the critique
posited by the content.

Problem

My
perspective is one in which I have less of a statement or proposition to
advance than a question to ask. Generally, where are we, and where do we go
from here? Specifically, is the new media paradigm different in its social
roles, and effects? Or is the shift we’ve seen in the last few years the
recurrence of a cyclical pattern, or some other type of pattern? Certainly, we
have seen a culture-wide shift in primacy from the concrete to the abstract
over the last century, which our individually specialized media consumption
obviously reflects, not to mention our heavily derivative-infused economic
system. Print media gave way to radio, radio gave way to television, and
television gave way to the Internet. Each case was taken as the radical
liberation of social discourse. Some even considered whichever rising medium
was new and novel to their respective time, the outright unpinning of social
order, same as today. And in each case, the major economic, and political
entities that owned the means to producing and circulating media, came to own
the dominant voice in the public sphere, and indeed came to own the hearts and
minds of the public at large. Again, none of this is new. The only newness I
find is my own experience, the personal dissonance I experience interacting
with new media, especially the prospect of seeking a career, or at least a job,
in the world of new media. I guess my intention is to find some way to
reconcile that with my lofty ideals surrounding the role of the fourth estate,
which seem to be grounded in the concrete, or at least grounded in the
headspace that takes the concrete world as morally superior to its
subsequent.

Working Outline

By the end of my second year of college I had rediscovered my
long forgotten talent for, and love of writing. At that time my writing
talent could be described as basic competence at expressing my own
thoughts clearly, and articulately in good clean grammatical form. But like
so many non-traditional students my mind was no tabula rasa. Instead I entered academia with a
brick-and-mortar worldview that, from my perspective needed not so much adjustment
as information, and the correct set of ready-made facts to justify it
decisively. Sure I had a certain innate awareness of linguistics, rhetoric,
trope, and an aesthetic appreciation for language itself. But I had not
studied literary theory, critical theory, poetics, literary traditions,
political philosophy, or free speech theory. My talent was raw but at
least my persona was of the type that tends toward liberal arts
disciplines. Such as it was, my identity was mainly informed by rebel
themes, DIY ethics, and a penchant for subversive behavior and I found
that it lent itself nicely to majoring in journalism.

My objective was to hold the feet of the corrupt, powerful,
and self-righteous to the fires of scrutiny. But, unbeknownst to me at the
time I was carrying a surprisingly conservative, almost religious belief in
truth. What I believed in was a sort of atomic truth that could be found
structurally in tact and at large, like something that floats around in
the ether, rises to the top of social discourse by a method of simple
mechanics, lies in wait to be discovered by the astute minded, and
transcends falsehood in an environment of free and open exchange. To be
fair to myself, it was not that I thought I had discovered truth myself,
but I thought of myself as one who was at least walking the path toward
it. I thought that I at least knew truth’s vector, that through hard
experience I had deciphered the rubric for quantifying it, that although I
had not found it yet, I certainly would eventually, and that although I
didn’t know what it was, I would know it when I found it. And it was going
to be my crusade as a journalist to point the public in that same
direction. Ironically, I may still be doing that.

Early on, I enjoyed many successes. I had made predictions of
how my academic career would track once I had made the decision to change
my major to journalism, and to secure a position with the student
newspaper. Things went pretty much as I predicted at first. I was awarded
scholarships, and periodically sent away to represent the school at
student journalism conferences. For a period of about two years, I felt I
knew exactly where I was going and how I would get there. Like so many
others I have openly criticized, I was taking my personal success as
universal affirmation of my worldview. And like so many others who I have
openly criticized, I only gave pause to reconsider after it all fell apart.

My first year as a journalism major I phoned in a near
perfect GPA while carrying heavy responsibilities on the newspaper staff.
I found the journalism program at UVU to fall far short of the academic
rigor I was looking for. The idea of interdisciplinary studies in writing
appealed to me and after learning that I had already completed the math,
and general academic prerequisites for matriculation into the Integrated
Studies program; the choice to switch majors was a no-brainer. By then I
had exhausted the few upper division journalism courses the Comms
department had to offer so I turned my sights toward English Lit, critical
theory and creative writing, and Integrated Studies core curriculum
classes.

I was denied the position of Editor-In-Chief of the student
newspaper, which I felt I duly deserved. In retrospect, the decision of
the publication board was probably not wrong. I was in a social
environment that I did not understand, and it became more and more
apparent as time passed. Others working alongside me seemed perfectly
adapted to new media. I watched as their low-cost social signaling on
Internet media sites yielded fairly high-value results. I couldn’t make
any sense of the economics.. Previously, I had been a firm believer that
it took high-cost signals to yield high-value results. That logic seemed
perfectly rational. And I had
thought of myself as one strong, and resilient enough to pay high costs
over and over. What I observed was that instead of prostrating oneself to
the value gods, all one had to do in the new paradigm was the equivalent
of speaking the word “prostrate.” I thought of myself as one who took
action over expression. In the world I had come from, people did as they
would, and spoke very little of it. The new environment consisted of
people who did very little in the instrumental sense, but spoke or
otherwise signaled accomplishments of virtually everything. I took the
change as magical thinking having toppled the rational for good, and
people who knew intuitively how to leverage those standards to their
advantage surrounded me. I felt alienated. I had long since rejected that
kind of religious behavior as a matter of personal piety. At least that
was what I thought. In truth, I had my own version of magical thinking at
the root of my behavior. It was just the wrong one.

I had recently immersed myself in the more creative, and
theoretical communication disciplines. My new curriculum consisted of
creative nonfiction instead of magazine writing, poetry instead of AP
style news reporting, fiction writing instead of PR, critical theory
instead of free speech theory. And thank god for that. Through those
studies I was able to find ways of understanding how my expectations and
my lived experiences could be so disparate. And even though I was deeply
depressed and unable to concentrate, I still enjoyed some very rewarding
successes. In any case, the prospect of working in print media seemed very
far-fetched, but only a minor setback since my longer-term goal was grad
school. All it meant, at least at the surface level, was that I would have
to find some other means of livelihood in the interim. However, what I
eventually realized to be the deeper truth of that decision was that I
would have to adapt myself to the new media environment.

At a writer’s workshop hosted by the English department at
the Capitol Reef Field Station, I became friends with another Comms major
with a bent toward the more literary side of writing. She was PR major,
creative writing minor, and she was, like my colleagues at the student
newspaper, perfectly adapted to the new media environment. She saw the world from inside the social
media habitat, unlike me. Her social
media profiles were rich, and in-depth. And although they could never be anything other than a repertory of low-cost social signals, which I had always considered superfluous, and cheap, interacting with her compelled me to retract my categorical dismissal of the value of that style of social behavior. I started to find the ability to re-evaluate my analysis of
that model. That re-analysis is ongoing but suffice it to say, I am learning
to identify with the idea of livelihood within that model although I am
still being rejected at almost every attempt.

Closing

At this point my infiltration into new, web-based mass media
industries is ongoing, and therefore difficult to outline. I have worked one
internship in which the job description advanced the idea that advertising and
marketing now have to play the role of journalism on the grounds that flagrant
sales pitches in an environment that is saturated with them, fail to captivate
audiences. The academic advisor for the Department of Communications tells me
that it is a new world for professional writers, that has not yet been clearly
defined. And in a recent conversation with Professor Hatch, he pointed out some
of the ways in which advertising in one issue of a trade publication, at least
in the IT industry sometimes drives the reporting in the next issue since
advertising sometimes breaks the story of emerging technology. I find shards of
hope in what I’ve learned that I will find some way to integrate vestiges of my
old-school values, rebel identity themes, DIY ethics, and penchant for
subversive behavior with the reality I now live in. I am looking forward to any
feedback that any of you may have on this subject, or any direction that you
may wish to give me regarding this project.Also, if there are any insights or bits of information regarding sources
that you may wish to pass along to me, it would be greatly appreciated.

Baudrillard considered The
Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, to be the culmination of his
work during the last twenty years of his life. Within its pages, Baudrillard offers his final analysis of
what he considered to be the most fundamental conflict of the contemporary era.
Baudrillard divided human civilization into two primary symbolic regimes that
operate as antagonistic forces against one another. One is based upon a system
of symbolic exchange, which Baudrillard describes as dual and reciprocal. The
other is based on money, and sign exchange, which he describes as totalizing.
While non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures,
the western world system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an
integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If
the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and
what will victory look like? Baudrillard hypothesized that the answer to that
question may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself,
threatening that system from the inside with the purest of symbolic forms, the
challenge of resistance.

Baudrillard
, Jean. Passwords. London: Verso, 2003. Print.

The best
place to begin understanding Baudrillard’s sociological analyses of symbolic
regimes is with his glossary of terms. Passwords
is exactly that, published into a book. Each chapter defines his specific use
of a single word or term, and indoctrinates readers into his language paradigm.
Consequently, for each term defined in Passwords,
there is a corresponding book. I doubt that the fact that many of the
actual books were written decades before Passwords
renders it any less relevant as a starting point. Marxism,
Post-structuralism, Freudian psycholanaysis, Derridian and Lacanian theories of
linguistics are some of Baudrillard’s more prominent themes, but his heavy
overlay of tech language, his fondness for Calculus metaphors, and references
to Gödelian feedback loops, lends his famously poetic syntax a very
contemporary voice. Since I will be analyzing the psychological and
sociological implications of industries that deal directly within prominent symbolic
systems, along with my own participation in them, I plan to rely heavily on
Baudrillard throughout the piece.

Based on
Baudrillard’s recurring analysis, which appears in more than one of his other
works, the worlds of advertising, marketing, and any related mass
communications media that have a persuasive objective, depend specifically on a
game of seduction. While a more vulgar concept might place seduction somewhere
between equivocation, and manipulation by means of flattery, Baudrillard’s
definition apprehends a much deeper affect. Baudrillard’s seduction is a game
involving what he calls the universal reversibility of signs, and symbols,
which he argues advertising takes even further, not so much to a logical
conclusion (because such a term radically contradicts the psychological impact
of advertising), but to what he termed “The lowest form of energy of the sign.
Degree zero of meaning. The triumph of entropy over all possible tropes.”

The world in
which I found myself accidentally immersed was one in which advertising had
shrugged off its role as a specific power. It no longer mediated any exchange
between inter-social agencies. Indeed it was a world in which the entire social
enterprise had collapsed into the simplified, yet agitated language of
advertising, where marketing and advertising were proffered as goods and
services, in and of themselves, while ordinary objects were sold as either
marketing solutions or bearers of derivative social values. And there I was,
seduced by it all, frantically trying to assimilate myself into it, getting
rejected at every turn.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. Print

The System of Objects is
professor Baudrillard’s in-depth, analytical critique of the contemporary state
of commodity fetishism. In Passwords he explains his fascination
with objects as originating from their apparent ability to break free of
functional purposes and become signifiers capable of establishing syntax with
each other and ultimately execute a form of revenge on the subject. The
object’s revenge is a heady concept that involves objects coding the behavior
of their human subjects with reductive signification, and symbolic values that they
bear—as a form of highly simplified language. Once freed from their use value,
Baudrillard explains, objects as derivatives or bearers of derivative
value—sign value, historical value, ideological connotations, sexual identity
themes, and so on, integrate into a discourse of their own, in which human
subjects play by their rules. As he explains, these derivatives, when combined
according the simplified language of advertising reduce the human experience to
a sort of gaming. Integral-Reality he calls it. The final conclusion to this
game is status.

While
Baudrillard concedes that objects probably always signified subjects, at least
in some way, he argues that prior to the pervasive circulation of advertising
through media, objects signified in ways parallel to real human experience. Now
however, we have fallen to a state in which advertising is our one and only
moral code in a game of status. Even to escape it, he explains, “in a private
sense, cannot prevent us from participating every day in its collective
development. Not believing in it still means believing sufficiently in other
people’s belief in it to develop a skeptical stance. Even actions intended as
resistance to it must be defined in terms of a society that conforms to it
(213).”

Now
imagine being an outsider in the environment he describes, in which politics,
economics, livelihood, religion, and any subordinate cultural discourses are
moderated on the personal level by the language of advertising. But here’s the
real kick in the gut. That last quote, and this last paragraph up to here, both
reveal the same identity themes I’ve asserted in my earlier posts—artist type,
DIY ethics, Billy the Kid, Odysseus lost at sea, penchant for subversive
behavior and the like. The Cinderella story, the underdog, the rebel, these all
show up as motifs in advertising at least as much as any others, and I’ve
clearly bought into them. And I’m afraid I would be lying to myself if I said
my central identity themes predate my exposure to media and advertising culture.
So maybe when I get to my Jaques Lacan citations I’ll find some redemption for
myself, some way to blame it on my mom, or dad perhaps. Until then, I’m stuck
in this weird paradox. And here is my worst fear—what if characters and themes
designed to appear resistant are exactly what give the system of objects its
equilibrium, and keep it from reaching its tipping point. If that is true then
I feel like Neo whose job is to fight valiantly, miraculously even, and lose
anyway, and Mr. Smith has just punched me in the junk for sport. Occupy Wall
Street anyone?

From the standpoint that art is an adaptive,
biological trait stemming from play, which is not exclusively human behavior
but observed in other intelligent species as well, Brian Boyd argues that
storytelling, particularly fiction, was adapted because of tangible advantages
it lends to human survival. Boyd’s account is comprehensive, and covers the
biological advantages storytelling creates for human beings in the natural
environment as well as the social benefits it generates within organized human
civilizations. It would take an act of pure divination for me induce the sum of
possible citations and insights this work provides. But one section that I find
to be right on point with my experience and the critique I intend to advance in
my capstone project is Chapter Eight. Acutely titled From Tradition to
Innovation, part of Chapter Eight introduces the concept of “Costly Signaling
Theory (117),” and contrasts high-cost and low-cost social signaling. Experience
leads me to project Boyd’s social signaling analysis onto communications media
in their various forms, and categorize them accordingly. Print media, by my
estimate at least, is high cost. Producing it is more labor intensive. It
involves physical materials such as paper, ink, and printing presses that must
be acquired. Over time, social
conventions, and market forces have imposed sets of standards for print media
production. Internet social media, on other hand, at least in the case of
individual users is remarkable low cost. A social media user needs only to set
up an account, create a profile with no imposed standards of validation—no fact
checking or the like, and they can immediately begin signaling to an audience
of potentially thousands. Seems superfluous to say the least. But what
surprised me was how quickly the value disparity between traditional print, and
the new high-tech media was leveled.

Ong pulls
together two decades of work done by himself and others on the differences
between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and
chirographic cultures to look at how the shift from the oral-based stage of
consciousness to one dominated by text changes the way human minds organize
information. His approach to the subject is both synchronic, in that he looks
at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic, in that he
discusses the shift in western civilizations from oral to text based which,
according to Ong, began with the emergence of script some 6,000 years ago. In
addition to pinpointing certain fundamental differences in the thought
processes of the two cultural models, he comments on the current emergence in
western society of what he calls a secondary orality. This secondary orality, Ong
argues, is dominated by electronic modes of communication, incorporates
elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been
subordinate for millenia.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Just to allay the professors' fears I would just like to first testify that the outline is well underway. Having put a good portion of it onto the page I can see a great deal that needs to be whittled away. Those moments when I'm having a hard time with the outline I defer to working on the annotated bibliography, and literature review. I'm posting a portion of that just to show that work is in progress.

Naturally, I've started with staples, big-picture texts, ones that I often turn to for insight into daily experiences, ones that I've read repeatedly and can summarize and cite more or less from memory most of the time. There is one quote that I looked up though. Just for the record, don't expect the rest of the annotations to be quite as long as these. I hope you don't expect that anyway.

Baudrillard , Jean. Passwords. London: Verso, 2003.
Print.

The best place to begin
understanding Baudrillard’s sociological analyses of symbolic regimes is with
his glossary of terms. Passwords is
exactly that, published into a book. Each chapter defines his specific use of a
single word or term, and indoctrinates readers into his language paradigm.
Consequently, for each term defined in Passwords,
there is a corresponding book. I doubt that the fact that many of the
actual books were written decades before Passwords
renders it any less relevant as a starting point. Marxism,
Post-structuralism, Freudian psycholanaysis, Derridian and Lacanian theories of
linguistics are some of Baudrillard’s more prominent themes, but his heavy
overlay of tech language, his fondness for Calculus metaphors, and references
to Gödelian feedback loops, lends his famously poetic syntax a very
contemporary voice. Since I will be analyzing the psychological and
sociological implications of industries that deal directly within prominent
symbolic systems, along with my own participation in them, I plan to rely
heavily on Baudrillard throughout the piece.

Based on Baudrillard’s
recurring analysis, which appears in more than one of his other works, the
worlds of advertising, marketing, and any related mass communications media
that have a persuasive objective, depend specifically on a game of seduction.
While a more vulgar concept might place seduction somewhere between equivocation,
and manipulation by means of flattery, Baudrillard’s definition apprehends a
much deeper affect. Baudrillard’s seduction is a game involving what he calls
the universal reversibility of signs, and symbols, which he argues advertising
takes even further, not so much to a logical conclusion (because such a term
radically contradicts the psychological impact of advertising), but to what he
termed “The lowest form of energy of the sign. Degree zero of meaning. The triumph
of entropy over all possible tropes.”

The world in which I found myself accidentally
immersed was one in which advertising had shrugged off its role as a specific
power. It no longer mediated any exchange between inter-social agencies. Indeed
it was a world in which the entire social enterprise had collapsed into the
simplified, yet agitated language of advertising, where marketing and advertising
were proffered as goods and services, in and of themselves, while ordinary
objects were sold as either marketing solutions or vectors for derivative
social values. And there I was, seduced by it all, frantically trying to
assimilate myself into it.

Baudrillard, Jean. The
System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. Print

The System of Objects is professor Baudrillard’s in-depth, analytical
critique of the contemporary state of commodity fetishism. In Passwords
he explains his fascination with objects as originating from their apparent
ability to break free of functional purposes and become signifiers capable of establishing
syntax with each other and ultimately execute a form of revenge on the subject.
The object’s revenge is a heady concept that involves objects coding the
behavior of their human subjects with reductive signification, and symbolic
values that they bear—as a form of highly simplified language. Once freed from
their use value, Baudrillard explains, objects as derivatives or bearers of
derivative value—sign value, historical value, ideological connotations, sexual
identity themes, and so on, integrate into a discourse of their own, in which
human subjects play by rules that arise more or less organically from the conditions. As he explains, these derivatives, when
combined according the simplified language of advertising reduce the human
experience to a sort of gaming. Integral-Reality he calls it. The final
conclusion to this game isn't meaning, or enrichment, or fulfillment. It's status, nothing more.

While
Baudrillard concedes that objects probably always signified subjects, at least
in some way, he argues that prior to the pervasive circulation of advertising
through media, objects signified in ways parallel to real human experience. Now
however, He believed humanity to have fallen to a state in which advertising is our one and only
moral code in this game of status. Even to escape it, he explains, “in a private
sense, cannot prevent us from participating every day in its collective
development. Not believing in it still means believing sufficiently in other people’s
belief in it to develop a skeptical stance. Even actions intended as resistance
to it must be defined in terms of a society that conforms to it (213).”

Now
imagine being an outsider in the environment he describes, in which politics,
economics, livelihood, religion, and any subordinate cultural discourses are
moderated, on the personal level, by the language of advertising. "What are you doing after the orgy?" Baudrillards famous last words still ring true. But here’s the
real kick in the gut. That last quote, and this last paragraph up to here, both
reveal the same identity themes I’ve asserted in my earlier posts—artist type,
DIY ethics, Billy the Kid, Odysseus lost at sea, penchant for subversive
behavior and the like. Cinderella scrubbing the floors of the palace, the underdog, the rebel, these all show up as motifs in advertising at least as much as any others, and I have
clearly bought into them. And I’m afraid I would be lying to myself if I said
my central identity themes predate my exposure to advertising culture. So maybe
when I get to my Jaques Lacan citations I’ll find some redemption for myself,
some way to blame it on my mom perhaps. Until then, I’m stuck in this weird
paradox. And here is my worst fear—what if characters and themes designed to
appear resistant are exactly what give the system of objects, as such, its equilibrium. What if it is resistance and revolution that prevent corrupt social systems from reaching a tipping point. If that's true then I was never as much an outsider as I am a rube. And that makes me feel like Neo, whose role is to fight valiantly, miraculously even, and lose anyway. And I've just been punched in the junk by Mr. Smith.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

I think I’m getting a little more focused on this now. The point Professor Jeffreys makes in one of his responses with the reference to Billy the Kid has a certain resonance that I’m starting to grasp. If I’m not mistaken I believe he’s referencing the circulation of comic books that valorized the New Mexico Outlaw’s exploits. Those things got real popular. Sure, it was news, and it was entertaining. They were heavily laden with ads but it was the stories that kept readers captive. The ads then became incidental exposure in the marketplace of ideas rather than manifest content. How very Meiklejonian of them.

From that realization I’m reminded of Scott Carrier’s suggestion that I should give the Capstone project a narrative structure—the whole Odysseus epic I mentioned in the previous post—rather than an academic, argumentative one. To do that would make the academia incidental same as the ads, and it would give the piece a clever form of meta-commentary. I can never resist doing that. Academia and advertising placed on an equal plane? Déjà vu.

From there I gain insight into methods that marketing and advertising professionals in Internet and new-media-driven industries are trying to do. It is not that they really want to provide an up-front service as much as it is that they are developing ways to make their true motives appear incidental. It’s a bait and switch. It was always a bait and switch.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

A recent discussion with an emphasis advisor has returned to me the spark for this project I’ve been lacking these past few weeks. The meeting was more or less happenstance. My most pressing business with him that day concerned other matters, his impending application for tenure, and my recent application for graduation combined with all the interwoven personal dynamics for both of us that tend to accompany those processes. In retrospect the question certainly had at least some oblique relevance to the conversation at hand, since we were both speaking generally about our lives. Weeks previous he had volunteered to serve as my emphasis advisor without me asking, and I had gladly accepted the offer. I suspect it was that we both took the agreement for granted is why we carried on from the initial inception without further discussion. So it was only natural that eventually, he would want to know about the topic. So as he and I were running down our respective lists of life challenges, he asked me to tell him specifically what my capstone topic would be. He wanted to hear the story of how I arrived at my topic, the way it related to the list of challenges I had just itemized, and what events or changes brought me to a new perspective. Initially he didn’t want to know why I no longer wished to argue for the salvation of the fourth estate, or to condemn the radical liberation of value from any referents, which some semanticists fear has been accomplished with the advent of the Internet, and was at one point at least a major constituent of an earlier capstone project.

He just wanted to hear the story of me. I guessed that he wanted reassurance that preserving the sanctity of the fourth estate, and demonizing the radical liberation of value would be central themes. So I began with that. No doubt the one whom I meant to reassure however, was myself, just to keep my identity theme in tact. He’s a journalist, a magazine writer, and independent radio producer. In short, he’s a storyteller who, by my observation, is especially good at getting people to tell him their stories, and identifying the deep structures, and dissonances present in the stories he hears. He also tends to describe his understanding of people’s stories using rudimentary shape metaphors, which I have always found helpful. And it was in the course of my telling him the story of the origin of my topic, that he suggested I make that story—my overall, personal experience of arriving at the topic, the vague, broad, general questions and specific prejudices that set me on this current path, the failures and setbacks that delayed my arrival here—the basic premise of my capstone project. He wants the personal journey, and the narrative arc. He wants Odysseus lost at sea trying to figure out how to rebuild his ship. He wants to hear how adventure began when all plans went wrong. He wants the whole messy mythos, but he also wants it to be a well researched, and cited too. He wants it to be Gonzo, which it is and then some. And there are certain events on the horizon of possibility that may blow the keyhole I’m seeing my topic through, into a gaping doorway.

Right now the potential for overlapping and even merging planes of my personal livelihood, most of which I have always worked to keep separate, makes my head spin. So let me clarify while trying not to go too deep into detail. The projections I made for my graduate and post-graduate careers have turned out nothing like the original plan. Events of various sorts have created the need for me to radically re-tool, and redirect more than once. And I’m now facing what many like myself—artist types with liberal sensibilities, punk-rock ethics, and a special fondness for subversive behavior—consider to be the horror of all horrors. I’m actively pursuing the job market in the smarmy, corporatist world of marketing and advertising.

I know, necessity notwithstanding, if I have any forlorn future hope of being able to look at myself in the mirror, I’ll have to sacrifice a high-end desktop computer at the foot of Baudrillard’s grave on the eve of the next fiscal new-year just to cleanse what’s left of my bruised and battered soul. But for now I need to survive to see that day come. And for those of my ilk, survival means finding a way to identify with livelihood, and circumstance while working to morph them into what I really want. And that, dear readers, is the general story. Specifics to come after a message from my sponsor.

Monday, January 30, 2012

I want you to listen carefully, and take heed. I want you to believe me and believe in me. I want to see your belief and heeding reflected in your actions, as well as your choice in personal accoutrements, henceforth from the moment this message is delivered so that I can believe and take heed too. Belief can be a heavy burden for one person you know—discomforting too. And I want to be comforted, and unburdened. Oh, and I also want guilt-free sex, money, and the praise of my peers. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAW!

Would it be overly cynical, reductive, or perhaps even simplistic to suggest that the point of all this sophisticated communication media, gadgetry, and technological infrastructure is reducible to the servicing of our most basic libidinal drives, and that the rest, the ideology, mythology, and politics—the whole potlatch—might be just a fluffed-up pseudo-reality principle meant to justify our libidos retroactively, and retrospectively? Don't hold me responsible yet. I'm only suggesting it. I'm not sure if I believe it. Belief is too heavy right now. I'm tired, and my back hurts. So does my front for that matter. My top as well. And so on.

In any case, I believe I've begun this post from the position of having preemptively wandered off topic. Weird. And there's no money in it. But maybe I'm not so far off. The writing process is the thinking process as Scott Abbott once said. And it has just occurred to me that—communication, its rhetorical devices, and the syntax it establishes with its audience based on the medium by which it is delivered—is at least one constituent of the whole I'm trying to direct my focus toward. Or in other words, the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan once said.

News as ads vs. ads as news. Is it just a question of priority at the heart of this issue? If a man bites a dog it's news. If a dog bites a man he needs new running shoes. I'm drifting again.

All I know is that if I'm going to analyze the use of social media by revolutionary political movements, I should read up on some of them. And as much as I hate to say it, reactivating my Facebook account may become prudent at some point.

Monday, January 23, 2012

So far the idea is vague, broad, and general. And it’s the third in series of vague, broad, general ideas for a Capstone project, but I’ll leave those others aside for now. Suffice it to say that, as a student whose emphases are communications and English, I want to research mass communications media, specifically (possibly) advertising, internet marketing, social media, as platforms for new rhetoric—that is, according to some—or perhaps platforms for the exchange of value through storytelling, if nothing else. For now I’ll refrain from either criticizing or endorsing any conclusion because I’ve only just started to ask the question. It seems a complicated enough topic without me trying to confine it to the conclusion I hope to find. I’ll obviously need to draw some focus.

A few years back I thought I was ready to tackle this. Capsone 1 I mean. Turned out I was mostly just ready to be showered with praise from my support system for having graduated. Neither one happened because I was taking it all way too seriously. I had a slightly different idea then—the first in the series of three I mentioned earlier. And it was even more broad, vague, and general. It turned out, as I learned in the course of reading, to be one of those cliché attempts to answer some universal question that undergrads are so well known for. Still, my Integrated Studies advisor at the time saw some promise in it—I think. But she told me I needed more critical theory. She was right, and I have since acquired a great deal more experience with critical, theoretical discourses. So the only relative certainty I have at this point is that I’ll be treating the subjects of my proposed inquiry as discourses, and criticize or endorse them as such, relying heavily on my experience with English literature, journalism, free speech theory, Postmodern and Post-Structuralist Criticism, and Media Criticism.

I would like to become even more expert in all of these, including the topics in question. My hope is that, in the end I will have done it in some way that lends itself to both the job market, and grad school prospects.

My initial question is derived from, what I am told, are current market trends in advertising and what I had previously understood to be the origin of news media—the way the two have always been necessarily linked. Newspapers began as handbills, advertisements for goods and services from merchants who included news to give the public a reason to read them that served public interests up front. And by this I mean interests that exist apart from the pre-supposed premise of service implied by the advertising function of handbills. News reporting, as I understand it became the service that gave advertising its merit and kept the public from automatically discarding handbills on contact. One of my favorite comedians, Mitch Hedberg, had a joke on this topic that comes to mind. He said every time someone gave him a handbill it was as if they were saying, “Here, you throw this away.”

According to Internet marketing professionals, the industry has come full circle. Advertising in and of itself no longer holds an audience captive. There’s just too much of it. Is this new? I don’t know yet. In either case, once again, or as usual, advertising and marketing messages need to compete for public attention by serving public interest up front. I find this claim interesting, but I don’t know that it’s true in the sense that it has been explained to me. If it is, I wonder if it’s true in the same sense as it was centuries ago. Now to focus the question…